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spirit drieth the bones.” It turns out that a powerful predictor of which nuns would live the longest was the positive emotional content contained in their youthful writings, even when the analysis was controlled for age, education, and linguistic ability. The lowest emotional group averaged 86.6 years old at death, the highest emotional group averaged 93.5 years old at death. Snowdon also argues that profound faith, along with prayer and contemplation, “have a positive influence on long-term health and may even speed the healing process,” but then oddly concludes: “We do not need a study to affirm their importance to the quality of life.” Oh yes we do, if we want to make this a scientific claim. In fact, prayer and healing is now a hot field of study in medicine, but to date the studies have been severely flawed, failing to control for intervening variables and lacking consistent findings across comparative studies. I have no doubt that Snowdon is right about the importance of community and close relationships, but you don’t need God or religion for that. All humans benefit from any type of social commitment because we are a social primate species.

There is another side to this story that recent research is illuminating, and that is that religious beliefs are not always a source of comfort during illness. In fact, in some cases, they may actually increase the risk of dying. A study conducted at Duke University Medical Center and Bowling Green State University, whose results were published in the August 13, 2002, issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, found that of the nearly 600 older hospital patients (95 percent of whom were Christian) negative feelings evoked by religious beliefs sometimes predicted mortality. Some of the key variables that increased the risk of death were feelings of being “abandoned or punished” by God, “believing the devil caused the illness,” or “feeling abandoned by one’s faith community.” “The study reminds us that religion … can, at times, be a source of problems in itself,” the lead author, Kenneth Pargament, concluded. Additional findings included: patients who reported feeling alienated from God or who blamed the devil had a 19 to 28 percent increased risk of dying during the following two years, although (and surprisingly) there was no association of gender, race, diagnosis, brain function, independence, depression, or quality of life with mortality. Duke University’s Dr. Harold Koenig noted that anger and frustration were normal grief responses when people discovered health problems. Those who were religious and were able to reconnect with God and their spiritual feelings could use those resources for support. But those who continued to experience conflict could be making their health worse. “Those people are in trouble and doctors need to know about it. Doctors need to be assessing their patients for these kinds of feelings.”

What we’re really after here in our search for scientific answers to the question of why people believe in God is the undergirding beneath the panoply of religious faiths. For Michael Barnes, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, the commonality is to be found in the thinking process itself. In his cleverly argued book, Stages of Thought, Barnes uses Piaget’s stage theory of development to argue that cultures, like individuals, develop in stages from easier cognitive skills to harder ones, and that not only religion and faith, but science and reason have followed this general pattern. Both religion and science evolved from simple to complex because complex cognitive thinking first requires simple cognitive technologies such as writing and formal logic, as well as simple social institutions that reinforce those skills that can then be built into formal religions and sciences. Barnes is certainly correct about science and technology, because they are cumulative and complex and depend significantly on what came before. I’m not so sure about religion. Is monotheism really more cognitively challenging than polytheism, itself more complex than animism?